Redundancy and Syntactic Reduction

This is a series of corpus-based studies and production experiments on syntactic reduction and too what extent it is driven by redundancy/information density/predictability.

More information on some of our projects on syntactic reductions:

• We have conducted corpus studies and experiments on the syntactic reduction of non-subject-extracted relative clauses:

  • for corpus studies of speech and writing, see Jaeger (2006 -- my thesis) and [http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/papers/WasowJaegerOrrDGfSpaper.pdf Wasow et al. (2009)].

  • we have also been running [wiki:/ORCreductionExperiments recall, completion, and forced-choice preference experiments on that-omission in object-extracted relative clauses] in collaboration with Roger Levy and Vic Ferreira at UCSD.

• for the syntactic reduction of complement clauses, see [http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/papers/Jaeger09UIDcomplementizers.pdf Jaeger (submitted)].

• [wiki:/SRCreduction Reduction of subject-extracted relative clauses] (so called whiz-deletion). Also, feel free to have a look at the [wiki:/Annotation annotation guidelines for the studies on subject-extracted passive relative clauses in the British National Corpus].

  • Tom Wasow also has done some studies on that-omission in subject-extracted relative clauses in non-standard English (not the same as whiz-deletion), which are summarized in the presentation we gave at the International Relative Conference, Cambridge, September 2007.

• Finally, I have some preliminary data on to-omission after the verb help in English, which I presented in some invited talks. Let me know if you want more information.